TWO:The engine set to work, and soon everything that had not been destroyed by fire was destroyed by water. But the flames were beaten. They hissed and blackened into smoke. When dawn broke over the eastern shoulder of Boarzell, the fire was out. A rasping pungent smell rose from a wreckage of black walls and little smoking piles of what looked like black rags. Water poured off the gutters of the house, and soused still further the pile of furniture and bedding that had been pulled hastily out of it. The farm men gathered round the buckets, to drink, and to wash their smoke-grimed skins. Reuben talked over the disaster with the head of the fire brigade, who endorsed his opinion of spontaneous combustion; and Realf of Grandturzel sat on a heap of ashesand sobbed."I'm sorry to have given you the trouble of coming here, Squire. But I thought maybe you and I cud come to an arrangement wudout calling in the police."
TWO:That visit was the first of several others. Starvecrow took the place of Cheat Landindeed, he seldom went near Cheat Land now. Rose gave him all the refuge he wanted from the vexings and thwartings of his daily life. She was not, like Alice, a counter-irritant, but a sweet drowse of tenderness and beauty in which he forgot his disappointment, thinking of nothing but the lovely woman he caressed.
